Roundup: Elon Musk is a terrible person
Read to the end for Donald Trump’s appearance at the Bitcoin conference
Elon Musk loves to tell (certain) people they need to have a ton of kids, but this week one of his own got fed up with his lies and attacks against her. Vivian Wilson, the 20-year-old trans daughter who legally unburdened herself of Musk’s surname in 2022, wrote a series of posts on Threads then spoke to NBC News after Musk misgendered her, deadnamed her, and said she was dead (“killed by the woke mind virus”) in an interview with Jordan Peterson, then followed it up with further lies on Twitter/X.
Vivian explained that a story Musk told about her picking out clothes for her father at age 4, calling them “fabulous,” and her loving theater and musicals was “entirely false.” She continued that he went to “the Milo Yiannopoulis school of gay stereotypes, just picked some at random and said ‘eh- good enough’ in a last-ditch attempt to garner sympathy points.” These are pure fabrications because Vivian explains that her father “quite simply wasn’t there” when she was growing up, and even worse, when he was “I was relentlessly harassed for my femininity and queerness.”
After the Jordan Peterson comments, Vivian had enough of staying silent about Musk’s lies, she explained to NBC News. “If you’re going to lie about me, like, blatantly to an audience of millions, I’m not just gonna let that slide,” she said. Expanding on her thread, she explained that her father was “cold” and “quick to anger.” He would harass her for being feminine and push her to deepen her voice to be more masculine as early as elementary school. She described his treatment of her as “cruel.”
Vivian said that despite Musk’s opposition to her identity, her mother is supportive of her. After Vivian responded to Musk’s most recent comments, Grimes, who has had three children for Musk, posted on Twitter/X, “I love and am forever endlessly proud of Vivian.”
Last year, Grimes posted that Musk was keeping their children from her and had to sue him to try to establish parental rights to the children. On Saturday, Grimes’ mother posted on Twitter/X that the children were supposed to be in Canada with their mother this weekend to see their great-grandmother who is in palliative care, but that Musk would not provide the needed documents and had instead taken X to Paris. She begged for him to let the children visit before their great-grandmother passes. Vivian posted on Threads that Grimes and Musk remain in “a custody battle,” and while Musk is in France, the other two kids “are stuck in a house thousands of miles away without their mother.”
You may have noticed Musk having X with him a lot over the past year or so, not coincidentally after his relationship with some of his older kids seems to have gone sour. Vivian explains, “X has been paraded around social media solely for the purpose of boosting his own brand image of ‘responsible father’ when that could not be further from the truth. Meanwhile, behind the scenes he is both uncaring and absent while robbing their children of a mother.”
Paris Marx
I’ve been a critic of Musk since long before it was popular for people in media. It was obvious long before his acquisition of Twitter that Musk was a bad person who mistreated his partners, his workers, and was selling a false persona to the public. But far too few people would call it out because he was making people lots of money — and provided great fodder for coverage. But after Musk’s embrace of the extreme right and one of his own children detailed how he was cruel to her, I truly do not understand how media organizations can continue to cover him as they’re used to doing.
Sure, the coverage has somewhat changed over the past couple years. It’s become more critical. But media still has a tendency to turn his tweets and bullshit business pronouncements into stories that rarely have the necessary context. And even then, how important is it really for there to be a headline about every little thing he says, when it’s probably going to be a lie anyway?
Beyond that, any business leader or politician who has anything to do with him should be hounded for associating with someone who positions himself as a great father but is so cruel to his own child. It’s long past time the star of Elon Musk came crashing back down to earth.
This week in the roundup: a deep-sea mining company’s own scientists say its plans would damage the environment, Roblox has a big problem with child predators, video game companies are already using AI to replace workers, and how did the CrowdStrike outage happen? Plus, the usual labor updates and other news you might have missed!
Over on Tech Won’t Save Us, I spoke to Jacob Silverman about why so many tech billionaires are getting behind Donald Trump, why so much crypto money is being spent on this election, and whether Kamala Harris will shift the momentum.
Have a great week!
— Paris
